Framing the Iraq War

Doctor Media's post earlier this week - about recent authors' criticism of UK media performance in reporting fully on the Iraq War - got me thinking about another piece I spotted in The Guardian a while back (actually, it was originally printed in December). It seems that The Guardian itself and even The Independent are also to receive some criticism on this count, if we are to accept the contention of David Edwards and David Cromwell (of UK media watchdog media lens). Their article (reprinted by commondreams.org) deals with the link between journalistic professionalism and an inevitable pro-Government bias (or "framing"). In making their case, they reference well-known critical structuralist scholars such as, in the U.S., Robert McChesney and, in the UK, James Curran and Jean Seaton (authors of the widely read Power Without Responsibility). They focus their attention on the (supposedly more critical) UK papers, including The Guardian and The Independent. And in making their case - "that the media's failure on Iraq was not really a failure at all, but rather a classic product of 'balanced' professional journalism" - the authors also remind us of some very pertinent - and often-forgotten - media history.

The modern conception of objective reporting is little more than a century old. There was little concern that newspapers were partisan so long as the public was free to choose from a wide range of opinions. Newspapers dependent on advertisers for 75% of their revenues, such as the Guardian and Independent, would have been regarded as independent by few radicals and progressives in, say, the 1940s. Balance was instead provided by a thriving working class-based press. Early last century, however, the industrialisation of the press, and the associated high cost of newspaper production, meant that wealthy private industrialists backed by advertisers achieved dominance in the mass media. Unable to compete on price and outreach, the previously flourishing radical press was brushed to the margins.

And the the kicker: "just as corporations achieved this unprecedented stranglehold, the notion of professional journalism appeared." The historical context is important here. You can argue all you want that professional journalism is good or bad; but you can't argue about how and why it got started. It got started in order to help publishers make more money. Of course there's a lot more to journalism than that. But still, without getting too deeply into it at this point, articles such as these provide a useful corrective to some of the assumptions we might make (e.g., that UK media are somehow intrinsically better than their U.S. counterparts).